By Walt Hickey

Take A Mulligan

Women made up 25 percent of golfers in 2021, which is up from 19 percent 10 years ago, a jump that is particularly noticeable among junior golfers, where the percentage has jumped from 15 percent in 2000 to 35 percent today. The sport grew in popularity during the pandemic, so much so that even the historic old boys club structure of the golf economy — no seriously, that’s not a figure of speech; Augusta National literally was an old club exclusively for boys until like 2012, and the top-ranked course in the U.S. started allowing women members in May of last year — can’t stand up to the changing tide.

Michael Croley, Bloomberg

Wind

The Department of Energy wanted to get to the bottom of what makes opponents of new wind energy tick, and to that end they surveyed 747 residents and modeled the exposure at 35,000 homes nearby 61 wind projects to a common complaint called “shadow flicker.” Some opponents of wind energy argue that when their property is in the shadow of a turbine, it’s annoying. And while that may be true, the study found no link between the exposure a property actually had to shadow flicker and how annoyed the owner said they were about the wind energy project. Indeed, 17 percent of residents reported being annoyed over perceived shadow flicker, but their properties weren’t any more or less exposed to shadows as people who weren’t annoyed. In fact, there were a few correlations among annoyance, but those were that annoyed people were more likely to say they didn’t like the look of the turbines, and they were less likely to have received compensation from the wind company.

David Iaconangelo, E&E News

Mercury

New findings presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference argue that the planet Mercury’s surface may be covered with tiny diamond shards given its rough-and-tumble formative years. The planet has lots and lots of carbon, which is the element behind such classics as “graphite” and “diamonds,” and let’s just say it’s got heat in spades. The pressure needed to turn carbon into diamonds may have happened 4 billion years ago, when it was hit by many, many asteroids during a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. After modeling the effect of 300 feet of graphite being smashed by asteroids, the researcher estimated that 30 to 60 percent of it could have become “shock diamonds.” While the justification to explore other worlds has always been present — for instance, the inherent masculine urge to go to Jupiter to get more stupider — the prospect of a surface covered with shards of diamonds definitely ups Mercury a little higher on the priority list.

Ramin Skibba, Wired

Doulas

The state of California this year had been poised to offer a benefit for enrollees in Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid health program, to pay for doulas to aid in pregnancy and childbirth, but the benefit’s been delayed over how much the state’s willing to pay. California initially proposed $450 per birth, which is lower than the $770 to $900 offered by other states, the $970 offered by military health insurance program Tricare, and less than a third of the $1,500 Rhode Island will offer when it rolls out its benefit in July. Doulas see that as a lowball offer, given that their work involves multiple prenatal and postnatal visits as well as presence during labor and delivery, which can last for 12 hours or more.

Rachel Bluth, Kaiser Health News

Audits

The SEC is reportedly investigating the big four accounting firms — KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers — over whether the consulting services they sell to large companies present a conflict of interest when their auditing divisions are hired as the auditors for those very same companies. Those four firms audit 66 percent of public companies with a market cap over $75 million, and since 2014 all four have also paid fines over investigations into their audit independence. There are 47 companies in the S&P 500 with, out of all the fees paid to their accounting firm, more than 25 percent of those fees actually consisting of nonaudit fees like consulting and advisory, which may present a problem of impartiality depending on what the SEC finds.

Dave Michaels, The Wall Street Journal

Defrosting

Thawing permafrost has caused a number of weird terrestrial happenings in lots of the tundra, including sinkholes, craters and mounds developing as the subterranean ice thaws. This, it turns out, isn’t just happening to the permafrost on land: A new study published in the journal PNAS revisited after nine years 10 square miles that had initially been mapped in 2010, and after scanning the undersea terrain they found 41 steep holes that simply weren’t there the first time they scanned it. Most of the holes were circular and the average depth was 22 feet, but one of the depressions was massive, 95 feet deep and 738 feet long by 312 feet wide.

Katie Hunt, CNN

Whale Fight

The Center for Whale Research in Washington has been photographing killer whales since 1976, and that resource allowed researchers to look at how different whales racked up scars over time. They tracked 167 killer whales over a 38-year period, and found that young male killer whales tended to have the most fresh scars. What was particularly interesting was the impact that food scarcity seemed to have on the scars, which can be understood as a proxy for fighting and aggression between orcas; it turns out that the years where salmon were more abundant actually saw more fighting (and thus scarring) than the years when the salmon the orcas eat were less abundant, which indicated that rather than fighting over limited resources, the whales mostly fought when they had the the energy to spare.

Marina Wang, Hakai Magazine

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